Plan B includes Chabot

John Chabot is about to add another item to his overloaded hockey resume — training Ottawa Senators players once the NHL lockout kicks in at midnight Saturday. He’s enthusiastic about the challenge, but after being around the hockey world a time or two as a player and coach, he also believes the NHL is on the verge of losing a healthy share of its audience in the United States due to the pending work stoppage.

John Chabot is about to add another item to his overloaded hockey resume — training Ottawa Senators players once the NHL lockout kicks in at midnight Saturday.

He’s enthusiastic about the challenge, but after being around the hockey world a time or two as a player and coach, he also believes the NHL is on the verge of losing a healthy share of its audience in the United States due to the pending work stoppage.

“It’s kind of too bad,” says Chabot, a former Hull Olympiques star who carved out a 508-game NHL career with Montreal, Pittsburgh and Detroit and later served as head coach of the Olympiques and as an assistant with the New York Islanders.

“Two-three years ago, I was in Taos, New Mexico, and I watched the NHL finals and it was a jammed bar. Taos, New Mexico, of all places. The basketball was also on that night, but nobody was watching. They were all watching hockey.”

Chabot worries that all that interest, created partly due to the league’s broadcast deal with NBC, could fade away again due to the lockout.

“Every time we take a couple of steps forward, something happens and we take 10 steps back,” he says.

“They’ve been saying hockey is the game of the future since 1980. It’s a great sport and once people watch it live, they’re hooked. But it’s about getting it out to the masses, like anything else. Once you get people involved, especially Americans and their attention spans … you get them to a game, you see how quick it is, it sells itself. And if we keep shooting ourselves that way, then it’s just going to take longer and longer and longer. And it really is too bad it’s happening again.”

As a former player and coach, Chabot can see the issue from both sides, but he tends to be more sympathetic to the players’ position. He was a player representative with Detroit in 1991, when players began the push to unseat the now disgraced Alan Eagleson as head of the players’ union.

While Chabot will head north in October, coaching and mentoring First Nations’ children through the Right to Play organization, he’s never far from a rink. When Senators conditioning coach Chris Schwartz called a few weeks back, asking Chabot if he wanted to help with the club’s informal workouts, he jumped at the chance.

When the lockout hits, Chabot will be a coach — of sorts — for the players who want to stay in shape.

“The players want to be ready to go and if I can help them out in any way at all, then I will come and help,” he said. “I’m going to talk to the players about what they want. If they want some combat stuff, then we’ll do some 1 on 1’s and 2 on 2’s. We’ll change the drills on the fly, depending on how many people show up (each day). We’ll fly by the seat of our pants.”

Chabot, whose second tour of duty as Olympiques head coach came as a replacement during the 2009-10 season, marvels at the speed of NHL players, even during off-season workouts.

“You forget how skilled they are,” he said. “They go out there and go 75 per cent and they’re faster than any junior player and the passes are on the stick. When they got on the ice, they’re not wasting their time. Some guys are going close to 100 per cent and other guys try to match them.”

NEIL LENDS VOICE TO WORLD VISION CANADA

Coming soon to a TV near you: A public service announcement from rugged Senators winger Chris Neil about the plight of starving children in West Africa.

Neil, former Senators centre Mike Fisher and Vancouver Canucks defenceman Kevin Bieksa will be featured in TV spots produced by World Vision Canada.

“It’s such a great cause,” Neil said Wednesday. “One dollar goes such a long way. There’s a famine over there.”

According to World Vision, 18.7 million people in the Sahel region of West Africa don’t have access to enough food or safe water and more than one million children need treatment for acute malnutrition.

“There are so many kids starving and you hate to see that happen. When they approached me about it, I didn’t hesitate to jump on board and help out.”

Both Neil and Fisher, who now plays for the Nashville Predators, sponsor children from the region.

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